We're starting to see this more often.
Major media outlets are
broadcasting, publishing and promoting The Big Lie. They are coming
right out and saying that the Constitution doesn't protect your right to
arms, as it always has.

The idea that the Second Amendment doesn't allow individual people to
keep and bear arms is so logically bankrupt it's hard to imagine why
anyone would use it in an argument.

If the Second Amendment doesn't mean you can bear arms, well, how
exactly did everyone get armed? It doesn't even make sense.

If the Second Amendment only authorizes the National Guard, then how
come there are gun stores? How come there have always been gun stores?
How come the Guard didn't exist until 1903? Why don't you have to
enlist before buying firearms?

Arguing that the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights doesn't
guarantee your rights denies history and the world we observe around
us. It is a dangerous lie that threatens your liberty.

The scariest part is that people hear The Big Lie and believe. You
must
ignore the evidence of your own eyes to adopt that position -- but blind
fear of guns is so intense for some people it prevents rational
thought. Such virulent gun-haters should sign up to never own or touch
guns in their lives, as they would have us do. Would they chuck freedom
for illusionary safety? It's a free country. Let them.

If media moguls and misguided dilettantes succeed in deceiving the
public about the Second Amendment, how will they explain state
Constitutions with even stronger language? Here in Arizona, "The right
of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the
state shall not be impaired..." (but raising private armies is
forbidden). Why would it say that if the Second Amendment, you know,
never meant what it always used to mean?

And there's the rub.

Except for the last few decades, keeping a firearm was universally
regarded as a normal, wholesome, safety-minded thing to do. It was
related to liberty, freedom, honor, strength, justice and yes, even fun.

Mouseketeers pranced twirling six-shooters, kids wore cowboy
holsters,
it threatened nobody. Gun rights were well understood AND EXERCISED for
200 years. Even today, in tens of millions of homes across America,
guns are for safety. Guns stop crimes. Guns save lives. Guns are OK.

Those who seek to disarm decent citizens are promoting a radical new
notion that gun ownership is solely related to crime and terror, and is
so dangerous, you dope, stop now before hurting yourself. Only the
rulers should be armed. You have no such rights, never did.

Is that Orwellian or what? The media paints gun ownership as radical
and extremist, but clearly, it is this new anti-rights agenda that is
radical and extreme, because the gun owners are the ones with 200 years
of tradition, history and law on their side.

Noted scholar Stephen Halbrook, Ph.D., did the legwork and concluded:

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it
does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If
anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains
one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for
no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states
such a thesis. The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the
Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth
Amendments -- that is, each and every free person."

Not surprising, considering the evidence:

"No free man shall be debarred the use of arms."
—Thomas Jefferson

"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed."
—James Madison

"The great object is that every man be armed.
Everyone who is able may have a gun."
—Patrick Henry

SIDEBAR

"To anyone who truly believes the public should be disarmed,
I personally urge you to take the gun-free citizen's pledge." —Alan Korwin

Citizen's Federal Gun-Free Pledge

"As an American citizen, of my own free will, I do hereby and
now
declare myself Gun-Free, never to keep or bear arms in any manner, for
the rest of my natural life, under penalty of arrest and felony
conviction."

Sign here:.

Alan Korwin is the author of seven best-selling books on gun law,
including "Gun Laws of America--Every Federal Gun Law on the Books, with
Plain English Summaries," and state gun guides for AZ, CA, FL, TX, VA. This paper is part of an ongoing series, call, write, fax or click for copies.